What happened this week is a terrible tragedy. Let's just get that out there. Many, many lives have either ended or will never be the same. Even those not physically injured will be emotionally scarred for life. Yes, for life. Its awful. Terrible. A shame.
Now that's over with, let's get down to brass tacks.
We will have our usual paroxysm of grief. We will collectively wail and gnash our teeth. We will lob 'hope and prayers' memes and messages on our Facebook pages and our Twitter accounts. We will hotly debate gun control issues with one another. Talking heads will extend their 15 minutes of fame mentally masturbating over the how-why-what's of the issue.
And ultimately we will do nothing.
We will return to our daily routines, watch our insipid television shows, worry about paying the bills...go about our lives.
We can't deny it. This same reaction happened a year ago when a sitting U.S. Congresswoman and many other innocents were gunned down by yet another idiot with a grudge and a gun. It faded. Here we are. We all as a nation wrung our hands together after the Chardon High School shootings, wondering how it could happen. Yet, here we are. Thirteen years ago a nation mourned when Columbine found so many of their young people laying about, their futures gone. Yet here we are.
Just so you know, since that day thirteen years ago, over 150,000 people in the U.S. were killed by gunfire. Over half a million were shot and survived.
Think about that.
Yet when those deaths come in ones and twos, dribs and drabs of lost humanity, it doesn't really register, does it? When its one gang-banger killing another, do you care? Even when the innocent bystander is caught in the crossfire?
No. Not really. We shake our heads, think its a shame, thank whatever deity we believe in it wasn't our kid, our wife or husband, our lives shattered.
So let's be honest with ourselves. We will, as a nation, mourn the lost and help the broken heal but we won't do anything about the root problem. This tragedy, like all the others, will fade from our collective awareness - that is, until CNN runs its special on the anniversary of the event.
As a nation, and this isn't talking about folks that actually advocate for change like the folks at the Brady Campaign, but as a nation we are unwilling to face the hard facts of the matter. You either have the Second Amendment and all of the good and bad that goes with it, or you don't. You either only have hunting weaponry - like the U.K. where gun violence is nearly unheard of compared to the U.S. - or you don't. People are generally decent and relatively sane, but it only takes one freak with a semi-automatic weapon or four to kill a whole lot of people.
I know, I know. "Guns don't kill people, people kill people". Yet, riddle me this, gun advocate? When is the last time you read about a knife-wielding manic killing over a dozen people before police brought him down?
If we're going to be honest with ourselves, and we should be, let's all just admit that we're just too damned lazy as a nation to take on this issue. Our attention span isn't long enough. Our intestinal fortitude is lacking.
Then we can stop wasting all of this energy pretending to be so grief stricken and go back to watching Big Brother and wondering about our favorite sports team's chances this year.
